Memories of Talisman Terry (RIP) as Colbert lampoons Keystone XL

With Stephen Colbert lampooning Keystone XL this week, the hotly debated pipeline has moved into a new realm of public consciousness alongside oilsands development and natural gas fracking.

The energy industry initiatives and Calgary companies involved – TransCanada, Talisman and Cenovus – have been mocked by Colbert or ComedyCentral colleague Jon Stewart this year. Sure, nobody enjoys being the butt of a joke but TransCanada should see it as homage more than hateful.

These days you’re not really a big deal until you’ve been given the business by Colbert or Stewart on The Daily Show. To me, it says “hey, we matter.”

Consider Alberta Premier Alison Redford’s response to Colbert’s interview with environmentalist Bill McKibben after the Obama Administration delayed ruling on the pipeline from the oilsands to Texas until after the 2012 election.

“Well, I love The Colbert Report. And he is incredibly smart about issues,” she told the Herald’s Kelly Cryderman in New York where she was promoting Alberta. “What I think is interesting is that he was talking about it. And that matters an awful lot for us. The fact that he talked about it in a way that was in my mind, in Colbert style, supportive was also very important. I think it does speak to the fact that people understand just how complicated this issue is, and how sophisticated we need to be about how we deal with it.”

Redford’s comments attest to the influence Colbert and Stewart have that goes beyond two-million viewers per episode. Those viewers include a lot of people who are in power or influence public opinion and policy.

Do these jokers have too much influence? I don’t think so. I’m confident people can process information from multiple sources, evaluate it and make judgements. We also live in the Google era of accuracy … it’s not always beyond factual reproach but for most people bombarded by news they don’t care about, it’s good enough.

Colbert and Stewart are more than good enough: most viewers rate their credibility somewhere between Walter Cronkite and Glenn Beck.

To me, Colbert was great with McKibben, getting the crusading environmentalist to acknowledge his personal carbon footprint is hypocritical. McKibben quoted a NASA climatologist calling tar sands production “game over” for a stable climate and would lead to mass flooding.

Colbert’s response: “On the upside doesn’t that leave us nice clean sand when we’re done, which Alberta will need for its beaches when it’s waterfront property in 50 years.”

In July, Colbert’s writers got hold of a kids colouring book produced by Talisman Energy in Pennsylvania as the controversy about the industry’s practice of fracking – pushing chemical- and sand-laced water into shale rock to extract natural gas – was heating up.

Colbert satirized the adventures of the “Friendly Fracosaurus” Talisman Terry, calling him the best extraction-industry kids character since Mountaintop Mining Manny. Personally.I support the coal industry’s Eyes For Frosty.

Amid the criticism, Talisman dumped Terry.

When Cenovus was mocked by The Daily Show in June, it put the clip on its website, noting the segment “focuses on Canada as a safe and secure source of energy for the U.S. (and) features our Christina Lake oil sands operations.” Yeah, sure it did. Did anyone notice “correspondent” Wyatt Cenac was drenched in fake blood when he asked if “Canada is a blood-and-oil-soaked rapetocracy?”

It’s been my experience very few industry executives see the humour in anything that points out irony about their industry or pokes fun at their company. So far so good at TransCanada but for the sake of the Canadian economy let’s hope Keystone XL doesn’t go the route of Talisman Terry.

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